


Live Wires

by cyrusbarrone



Series: Recovery [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Bucky Barnes's Metal Arm, Gen, Metal Arm Focus, maybe angst?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-21
Updated: 2014-11-21
Packaged: 2018-02-26 12:36:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2652287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyrusbarrone/pseuds/cyrusbarrone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Winter Soldier reminiscences about the only constant in his life being removed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Live Wires

The Soldier sat pin straight, his right arm tucked snug against his side whilst his left was pulled straight across a shining stainless steel countertop. Iron Man, or Antony Stark (son to Howard Stark, target number 026) sat next to him. He wore a black t-shirt with a band logo on that The Soldier did not recognize. A section of armour from the arm was missing, and thin wires in colours of coppers and silver curved from the shell of his arm. Sparks flew from the wires, blue and distracting. The Soldier wanted to shut his eyes against the sparks, though did not, if he did Iron Man’s threat levels would raise a mark and The Soldier would need to neutralise the target. 

“Your arms like a death factory,” Stark informs. The Soldier turns his head to look at Ex-Target 036, and he tilts his head, frowning. He wants to know what Stark thinks he can do about it, and The Weapon twitches where it’s being held down by Stark’s gloved hand. 

The Soldier recites, because that is what he knows how to do, “The Weapon was created as an enabler to The Soldiers’ abilities. The Weapon is key; The Soldier is not.” He takes a breath, “if The Weapon begins to harm The Soldier, then The Weapon must be removed and The Soldier replaced. The Weapon is an asset to HYDRA and should be protected.” His mouth snapped shut and he turned his head away slowly to look straight ahead with dull grey-blue eyes. 

Stark gives him a pat on the arm – The Weapon – as though he were sympathetic, and it is strange to The Soldier. He has never once felt warm hands on the metal prosthetic (because that was what it was, Nicholas J. Fury, Ex target 034 hold him so. He said it was only a prosthetic and that The Soldier should accept it as his arm) in a way that was not to harm. Dr. Zola’s hands had been cold and tiny, frosty where they touched the armour when he ripped the plates off screw by screw. Captain’s hands had been bare and fast, fisted and there to hurt and harm what would not be harmed.

“Hope you don’t do that ‘round the ladies,” Iron Man grins with very white teeth. He held The Soldier’s wrist down again and ducked back down to look into the nuclear bomb that was The Weapon, black goggles slipping down onto his nose. He poked at the open wires with leather gloves, “the whole reciting thing can put some people off.”

The Soldier did not reply. He was not built for small talk, he did not do idle chat about women, not when he barely talked in general. His tongue had been metaphorically chopped and diced while he was held in the grasps of HYDRA, and he no longer knew how to use if from something other than codes; survival rates or risk. Captain told him that he used to talk a lot, when the man whose face he held was someone different, used to charm gals until he got their lipstick to smudge and their dresses on the floor; round their hips. But The Soldier was not the man that Captain said he was, so he did not talk. 

The sparks began again, and Stark stopped talking. The Soldier was grateful for that, because he understood silence. It hadn’t been quiet since Captain had found him and pulled him out of squatting in a safe house. People were always talking to him now, assuring him that this wasn’t HYDRA and that he was safe; it didn’t mean he trusted anyone. The Soldier did not feel safe here; he wasn’t programmed to feel safe or comfortable, he was programmed to install fear into his enemies and power into HYDRA. But HYDRA did not exist now, not in his world, and The Soldier was lost. 

He knew that what SHIELD was doing here was to get him back to being who Captain says he is. When he had woken up from being taken by SHIELD he had been in a room with décor from the forties and he destroyed it all with The Weapon. The Soldier needed them – what was left of SHIELD – to understand that all he was was HYDRA’s favourite toy. He was not a man who broke some bloke’s nose because he was fighting with a tiny version of Captain in a back alley. He was not the man who once worked at the docks and smoked cigarettes he had stolen from the neighbours. And he was not the man that Captain looked at with too open eyes; filled with love and hope. No person cold look at a monster like that, except perhaps its creator until they realise what they have done. 

His thoughts stop when the whirring sound from The Weapon does. He didn’t remember it ever stopping, and if it had stopped, been broken, then Zola had fixed it too quickly for him to notice- for The Soldier to become useless. He looked over at Stark and then at his prosthetic, frowning. When he tries to lift it he cannot. It is a dead weight connected to his body, hooked up to his spine, and he feels useless and panicked because he has been disarmed in a place he does not trust. 

“Turn it back on,” he ordered, though his voice is calm through his gritted teeth. He was not programmed to feel panic- and even if he were to feel panic, he was not allowed nor able to display said feelings He tries to move the arm again but just feels the metal weight pulling as he tries to hit his fist into the worktop. He feels a little frantic, and his stomach is feeling heavy all of a sudden, sick. “Turn it back on!”

Stark is watching him carefully, his eyes huge and magnified and dark in his goggles and it reminds him of Zola. He remembered Zola, tiny and hobbled, so proud of the creature he had created, like Dr. Frankenstein. Stark pushes back the goggles from his eyes and they hold his hair back, leaving his cheeks smudged with grey. The Soldier twitches in his seat- unsure on what to do. He can't attack him with only one arm; it was heavy anyway but without the electric he knew he wouldn't be able to walk comfortably. "I don’t know if I can do that, Barnes,” he says, eyebrows furrowing.

"I am not ‘Barnes’," he snaps quickly to disassociate himself from the name that all of SHIELD was trying to force onto him. Eyes narrowing, he looks around the room and accesses his escape routes. The door is too far away and it is blocked by a counter top anyway; the window is locked and is likely to have a heavy alarm system to alert the whole of Stark Towers of his escape and the air vent too high for the dead weight of his arm. The Soldier says, "I am not any of the man that the Captain says I am." 

Stark leans back in his chair and plucked at grape from a plastic box. He pops it in his mouth. The Soldier watches as he leaned back over the opened armour and begins to take the rest of the plating off. "Maybe so, Cap did say you were a bit of a joker back in the good days."

The Soldier does not reply, and as more of the plating comes off the gentle whirring begins again and he lets out a breath he didn't know he had been holding. There was comfort in that whirring. It was the only thing that had stayed the same in his entire life time, it was the only constant he had and he wanted to keep it. It had kept him calm and breathing on a mission that had him thinking too much.

That mission had been in '72. A high up member of HYDRA was found out to be giving intelligence to SHIELD about their attempts at imitating The Winter Soldier gene, and she had needed to be assassinated. The intelligence, they found out later, was from their old files from the forties when they had first started to build The Soldier into something that resembled The Captain. The intelligence had given SHIELD solid knowledge that The Soldier existed.

It had taken a week of training to get The Soldier perfect at working in a sandy terrain and with a hot climate. There had been a big warehouse on the edge of a nowhere town, and it had been manufactured into a desert of sorts. It had hot and burning sand that itched the gaps between the plating of The Weapon, hot moist air that made breathing through the muzzle of his mask near impossible. A training ground he had spent a week in, throwing knives at running HYDRA agents, getting used to the throwback of sand when he threw a grenade. He may have been programmable like a computer, but he was not that easy to alter and fix. He wasn’t perfect in the sense that HYDRA wanted him to be. He had still been too much of a human. He’d needed the training because he had previously been stuck in places where ice stuck the metal of his fingers together, and snow clung to his hair. Sand was new and different.

The Soldier was woken from ice only hours before the assassination, and assigned with his weapons. There was a singular grenade on his belt- sandy environments were not ideal for bombs, so they kept it to a minimum, and knives strapped across his back. In a thigh holster sat a hand gun, and hanging over one shoulder a machine gun. His clothing had been modified to thinner and more breathable material; the mask held an air filter that kept him from inhaling sand or any gases, still not good enough- it still got fogged up with condensation if he dare breathe to hard. 

When The Soldier was dropped down from a helicopter onto a beach it did not take long to locate the rogue HYDRA worker, they had dropped him off only a few feet from her very location. It was to be a quick job with as little fuss as possible, with the hope of no civilian deaths in the crossfire. The woman was in a hut at beachside, and wore a suit jacket and a skirt that went to her ankles, both in a sensible grey with thin pinstripes running down both of their lengths. The Soldier did not know who she was. It was not important. When he had walked into the hut she held a shining black gun up to him and pulled at the trigger of it, but the slug hit into The Weapon and refracted with a metallic pang and The Soldier barely winced. 

"I didn't think I'd get the infamous Soldier for my killing," she admitted, and smiled sadly at him before he launched himself at her. It wasn’t his job to speak to her, to explain why it was him who was here; it was his job to get her heart stopping and her mouth to stop leaking intelligence like a broken hosepipe. She did not fight back, and as he held The Weapon around her neck and squeezed, she held her fingers around its armour, red polished nails pressing in. He cracked her neck, and her fingers immediately loosened and her body got slack. The Soldier dropped her in a heap on the sand covered floor. HYDRA would clear up the body later and she would disappear from all files. She will never have existed. 

When he leaves The Weapon is hot to touch and whirs comfortingly. He pressed his flesh fingers around the wrist and stares at the sky in wait for the helicopter. The sun burns his eyes through his goggles and he wonders why she gave up so easily, was life so meaningless? The Soldier did not have a concept of life, apart from the fact that they could end very quickly. That he was able to end lives quickly, easier than most people could. He had never thought about it before, and the air came in faster through his mask, condensation wetting his mouth, his top lip. The whirs of The Weapon fill his ears. He calms, and stares at the sky. 

He doesn't remember what happens once he gets onto the helicopter, apart from the cold. He won’t ever forget the cold. 

Stark's voice is loud in his ears when he says, "we're going to have to go to surgery with this. You've already been exposed to too much copper poisoning, radiation, whatever. The arm cannot stay." He doesn’t look sad by his own words, looking into the bared wires of The Weapon- of The Soldier’s arm. 

The Soldier turns and looks at him, and recites, "The Weapon is key. If it begins to harm The Soldier, remove it." 

He doesn't finish his recital, but can’t help but feel the slightest bit of sadness at the idea of the whirring coming to an end. Of his only constant stopping.

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for my college application, it was hell having to edit the names but I'm really proud of this to be honest!


End file.
